Bri

This really illustrates what I dislike about Robotech. It's a dub and editing job with a different name, not a real piece of creative work. What was good in RT, was good in the original counterparts already. Time has moved on. Since the anime boom of the late 90s anime fans increasingly disapprove of "westernising the original work". With that change any chance of rebuilding Robotech is dead in the water, even if HG managed to buy a few more licenses for a new hack job. Sure RT was cool and fresh in the 80s now all that remains is a sense of nostalgia and a few obessed fans. Trying to reanimate this dead corpse ended up with Frankenstein offspring like the Wildstorm comics and Shadow Chronicles. Wish HG'd just give up and sell their anime licenses to ADV and RT.com to a psychotherapist.

I think Macross Zero's CGI is much better intergrated with the 2d animation. In Yukikaze I often got annoyed by the style change between the two. Also while the yukikaze was very well done the backgrounds and hostiles often were not. Macross zero is less ambitious in some regards but is way better balanced and aged much better when the state-of-the art image had worn off. Agreed on the Engrish, also the radio distorted communication was cool. I don't mind Jack and Rei being gay, heck I could tolerate Tom Cruise in Top Gun for the sake of the F14s... Wonder if battle fairy Yukikaze is a translater injoke.

Well the fansubs are fantastic but won't give us any new information. Any real suprises are bound to come from those books comics etc, who few of us have seen and read. I for one look forward to new fuel for our fan ramblings on all things Macross

Recently watched: Yukikaze: Nice aircraft action and great designs, the CGI is a bit dated now. Slow plot with little background info, which does not have to be a bad thing, but a lot of wtf moments in the plot (or lack thereoff) annoyed me. Why am I not surprised this was a gonzo production. Almost expected Jack to sing Watashi no Kare wa Pilot. Ghost in Shell 2 Innocence: Seemed interesting but the subs from the dvd version I had were a bit poor. Think I missed some essential bits of information here and there. Was rather similar to Bladerunner in some aspects. Air: Some plot changes were abrupt and much was left open to interpretation. But so cruel...

I'd like to see in range of 1/10 Pvc figures of the main characters of mostl Macross series. Preferably by one of the better producers like Maxfactory or Wave.

Amen to that. Heck, Freds own animated project Goldigger: Timeraft (OVA) is way better then Shadow Chronicles.

Looks like a woodlands paint scheme, interesting. Nice alternative to the hero mechs.

You raise a very interesting point. It is certainly true that the anime industry is catering heavily towards the otaku. I doubt the industry did it out of choice and more by necessity. As far as I know anime pretty much disappeared from prime time Japanese television in the late nineties. The networks had imposed stricter content regulations and program slots became more expensive. I’m not sure if this was the result of media scares linking some serial killer and sex offender cases to anime fans or if it was a normal social-economic development. Anyway with the TV market in a slump, the majority of the industry switched to the DVD format with merchandising to survive. (I’m aware that most of you already know this but I’ve added it for the sake of completeness.) My point here is that the industry was mainly reacting to circumstances and was not actively seeking this niche. At the end of the day the people that work in the industry are in it for a living. If catering to a minority target audience is the way to earn the most given the circumstances then you can’t really blame them. Without anime on prime time TV how are you going to bring it to the attention of the mainstream audience? Still the anime industry has survived many changes so I wouldn’t be surprised if things look completely different in a few years. Developments in ways of online distribution like the yahoo channels of Bandai and Kadokawa or Crunchy roll may bring about a return to mainstream. Same goes for Animax as a worldwide operating pure anime TV station. As an example of this change in the main demographic: the audience for anime/manga and related merchandise in my country is shifting more and more from young adult males to teenage boys and girls. Ironically this has only increased the demand for 'perv' material. Reaching a wider audience may be more a matter of distribution then controversial content/merchandise.

Selling licenses for any kind of merchandise is part of the core business for any anime producer these days. MacF is not even an extreme example. No one is forced to buy this type of merchandise. More sold means more profitable franchise and a bigger chance for sequels. I'm sure if Lucas and Disney didn't have a family friendly business image to protect they'd branch out in (semi)-erotic content as well.

It's from ATMOSS the Australian online trademark system. I've checked in which countries HG has trademarked Macross. If you play around with the Aussie system you can see that HG only ever copyrighted Robotech (altough that trademark has lapsed).

Unknown, the only thing we do know is that a potential Australian release can't be blocked or interfered with by HG. It doesn't mean there are no other factors that could prevent a release. Without direct acces to the US market an english sub/dub may just not be profitable. Who knows.

M7 was popular in Japan 15 years ago and back then it would have been a hot title to license. Today, it is most definitly not a guaranteed succes for a western release. As anime52k8 said, it will have a hard time competing with newer anime. This is not a time where licensing firms want to try risky titles. (CPM for example filed for bankruptcy a few days ago). If a Macross title is released in the West then the most likely candidate is Frontier HG has not trademarked Macross in Australia. There are no legal issues with a possible release of Frontier there.

When someone is not to happy with the mod style here, feel free to check out the Elitist Jerks forums(gaming). That's an example of how a real police-state forum is run. You may find the mods here to be a little more relaxed after that.

Most of the newer of anime get licensed in the development stage (from David Williams, ADV). Given that Bandai Visual has done the Japanese release of Zero, M7 and Frontier it is quite possible that they also have the international rights to these series. So if we assume for the sake of argument that these series are licensed, why aren't they released? Mecha is not popular among the younger anime audiences. M7 and Zero are not guaranteed hits, not even among mecha fans. Frontier might have a better chance ude to its popularity however: it might be very expensive due to music rights, not sure how that works for an anime that may have been licensed already (we really don't know, Gububa and myself had a discussion about that some days ago in an other thread). the Macross trademark is in the way of a US release, renaming it might be to much hassle. Personally I have hopes for a UK release when the HG trademark drops but who knows. Alternatively Australia is an option if the trademark is a problem.

Put in some overtime and get all three

Yup, the engines are in the feet, they are quite compact. As for the town. I feel the TV series gives the more interesting representation of the city. Multi layered plateaus, in some episodes they show at least 5 layers for the city. Which can be moved or rotated during transformation. I kind of imagined this to work like some upscaled luxaflex system. People salvage whatever they can from the folded island to build a city is a quite clever way of explaining the origin of the city aboard the ship. There is probably quite a bit of anime magic involved. I doubt the original designer expected the 10 year olds watching the show to take it so serious later in life and do actual calculations. To make it work the easiest way to cheat would to enlarge the Macross a bit to allow for everything shown. Still if you were to take thing to way too serious and tried to engineer everything in a cross section drawing, I'm sure you could get a long way if you allow the city to extend bewond the legs. Things like the park and the stadium would be a tighter fit and the ceilings would be lower but for the most part it could work.

Watched the first four episodes. Pretty good sofar, nice mix of Gurren Lagan and French Sci-Fi noir. Love the way they are taking the piss with the standard shonen story. Wonder how they managed to convince Nike to go along with this, heh.

Ewilen's post on the DYRL rights. Probably the most detailed one on the current boards: DYRL rights

A thread on toy news. Forum members can post links to relevant information. No discussions, just an collection of links to info on latest toys. Scoopda thread

In short the idea was to split the license information part from the RT/HG thread. So people who want info on the legal status on the Macross license can read up on what we know/is confirmed without having to wade through 125+ pages of RT/HG bashing. Lonewolf set up a first post for a short (hopefully) pinned and locked thread with just facts about the legal status of the Macross licenses. A suggestion would be to treat it like the Scoop thread. Only news with propper references and no discussions. This would of course need mod approval/support but nothing tried, is nothing gained. -edit: Gubaba beat me to it, we both jumped in on Roy Fockers question

Tbh if so much of the original information is in the archives then we should start digging. Wonder if it's possible to reactivate that thread?

hmm, I'm not sure. There were quite a few posts early on in this thread by people like Radd, the white drew cary and Ewilen who dug up info on the lawsuit, the HG crackdown on e-tailers etc. Also some contacts with industry people were mentioned. I'm sure there could still be some usefull bits floating around.

Yea, it's a very nice start. Hopefully we can extract all the usefull info from the current thread in a few pages.

Would it be possible to split this topic at some point in say, the License debate and a Robotech thread? This thread is one of the few online resources that has any, more or less, decent information about the legal situation around the Macross license. It gets annoying having to wade through pages and pages of discussions about the inner workings and politics of Robotech.com, HG and it's employees. I'm sure that people have fair reasons for their gripes with HG and have as much a right to discuss those in a thread. However it makes reading up on the license debate very tedious.

Fair enough, I guess we can't really confirm if it's the music rights or the legal issue that prevent a release outside of Japan. There is just not enough info to work with.